When I was nine years old, my mother brought a Ouija board home,
lent to her by a work colleague. She and I, and one of her mates,
spent the evening around the dining-room table, communing with the
spirit world. 'Course, we didn't know that's what we were doing, I
think we just thought it was a wackier than usual board game and I
definitely don't remember being scared, just intrigued.
Not long after that, rumours started circulating that Ouija
boards were illegal in the UK (can't actually find out whether this
is true or not) and for the first time I realised just how daring
we'd been that night. I became the only kid in school who'd
actually experienced one. I was able to say, with absolute
conviction, that it worked. Something, beyond our conscious selves,
was moving the planchette around that night.
I haven't seen one since, but I've often wondered if that Ouija
Board encounter was the start of my love affair with the macabre.
I've been thinking about it a lot just lately, because in a few
days time I have to take to the stage at the Theakston's Old
Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate and talk about the
fashion for blending hard-hitting, gritty crime with tales of the
unexpected.
Best-selling crime writer, Andrew Taylor will be chairing the
panel, The Outer Limits, and will be joined by Sarah
Pinborough, Phil Rickman, Patricia Duncker and me. What interests
me about the subject, and I hope my fellow panellists will shed a
little light, is why, given that tales of the daemoniac are
ingrained in every culture in the world, have they never been
accepted into the mainstream of crime-writing?
The oldest and strongest emotion known to man is fear. (Whole
load of tosh talked about it being love: it's not, it's fear) The
oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
Consequently, from the time we started painting, spirits and demons
have featured in our artwork; from the moment the first song was
sung, our music and poetry has touched upon the weirdly horrible;
and since we've been telling each other stories, these stories have
included tales of the other, nebulous world that sits in parallel
to our own.
So why is it that, although I can cite any number of perfectly
respectable writers who've dabbled in the dark arts, (Dickens,
Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Browning, WW Jacobs) it still lies on
the fringe of respectable genre fiction?
Well, I have a theory (and it won't make me popular) that only
the truly sensitive can appreciate the story of horror. Let me
explain: our modern lives are so exceptionally busy, fraught with
demands and deadlines; we worry about our jobs, our nuclear
families, our extended families, our status, our finances, our
health, the list goes on. We simply do not have the time, or space
in the brain, to step back and listen for the scratching of
fingernails down the window pane, for the beating of black wings at
twilight. We dismiss the weird as rubbish when, what we really mean
is, we do not have sufficient emotional energy to let our
imaginations to be receptive to something new. For these, the
majority, tales of ordinary feelings and everyday events (albeit
dark and dangerous ones in the case of crime aficionados) take
first place.
If you think I'm talking twaddle consider, for a second, the
fabulous popularity of horrible and fantastic fiction among
teenagers and young adults. People under the age of 21, generally
speaking, have little to occupy their minds other than school work,
body image and whether the boy in the upper sixth fancies them
back. Young people can detach, and consequently still have the
emotional sensitivity to be receptive to a weird tale. Fast forward
a few years and all the anxieties listed above come into play. Some
of us, of course, never lose our ability to detach and we are the
ones who continue to love the spectrally macabre. Those who can
detach a little more than others are, quite possibly, the ones who
write it.
So there you go, I have to sit on stage in six days time and
tell around a hundred crime fans, some of 'em pretty butch, that
they're just not sensitive enough to appreciate spooky stuff. Wish
me luck!
By the way, the Ouija Board told my nine-year-old self that I
would marry a man called Simon. Mr B is not called Simon, but I
guess there's still time for fate to determine whether a) there
really was an all-seeing spirit with us that evening or b) I was
just thinking of that grimly spotty kid across the back.